New Mexico Mercury

For two thousand and fourteen years—the entire period known either as A.D., “After Democracy,” or C.E., the “Congressional Era”—our government has been gridlocked. And Americans are SICK AND TIRED of it. We showed in the midterm elections that we finally want to get things done, so long as one of those things isn’t voting.

Hey, we never claimed that we wanted to DO things! We just want them DONE. Take, for example, Star Wars. I’ve been waiting since before the prequels for a real Star Wars movie to get done. When Disney bought Lucasfilm two years ago, including its intellectual property in the form of George Lucas’s brain in a Tupperware, I thought we’d have a new movie by Christmastime. I mean, these are the same Disney folks who wrote “Frozen” in a single weekend.

Instead, it took until last week to write the new movie’s TITLE. In case you’re not a super-nerd or a human being with the internet, the title is “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” I suppose it’s catchier than “The Force Wakes Up” and truer to the original films than “Star Wars: The Force: The Musical.”  But come on. I could write an entire title with more mass appeal, more explosions, and way more implied sexual tension in far less than two years.

Or Disney could have catered to its base with “Star Wars: Hey, Look, We Brought Back Han Solo While Harrison Ford Is Still Medically Alive.” But I’m not in charge of a multi-billion dollar industrial entertainment conglomerate enterprise, so what do I know?

This is what I know: if you want something done right, you have to put it on a to-do list so you can cross it out.

I write a to-do list every day I remember to do it. In order to feel accomplished by bedtime, I fill the list with routine activities. For instance, on a randomly selected to-do list that I just pulled out of my pajama pants, I have yet to cross out “bathe.” But I have about five lines through “eat a cookie.”

As you might suspect, I face a deep self-evaluation when I wake up—or, “awaken”—and look in the mirror each afternoon. I must ask my innermost self: Once I’ve crossed out all the cookies, how do I manage the rest of my list?

The answer is “prioritizing.” Crossing things off a to-do list is not enough to stay productive. I have to prioritize that list so that I clear out space in my fridge before my apples go bad.

You see, my mother gave me about fourteen grocery bags of apples from some stranger’s tree. I promptly stuffed them in the fridge and ignored them. But I knew, deep in the back of my brain, that starving children in China would love the fridge they built to be put to better use. So I wrote “Make Applesauce” atop my to-do list.

I love applesauce, particularly because it has zero resemblance to apples. I have never bitten into a spoonful of applesauce and said, “Gee, where should I throw away this apple core when I’m finished?” or, “Shoot, this apple turned mealy!” or, “Looky, a worm!” Besides, I for one am confident that the process of turning apples into applesauce also turns worms into applesauce.

Yes, it would have been both quicker and more capitalist to buy a jar of applesauce from the grocery store. But if you’ve ever bought prepackaged applesauce from a box store, you know full well that it is not free. And I am never one to turn down free food. That’s how I ended up with the apples in the first place.

I pulled all the dishes out of the sink so that I could clean the apples. While they soaked, I made room for them by clearing overdue library books off the kitchen table and blowing away the dust. And then I spent the next three days peeling apples.

But when I was done, I had a heaping mound of apple scraps, and a noticeably smaller pile of chopped apples. I scooped these into a slow cooker. When they finished cooking down, I had my very own spoonful of applesauce. After all the effort, it was so delicious that I’ll never do that again.

But what matters is that I did it once, and I crossed it off my list. My culinary success just goes to show that with a good to-do list, anything from Hollywood magic to frontier-style homesteading is possible. I hope this new get-things-done Congress is paying attention. If it can be twice or even three times as productive as I am, it is certain to accomplish as much as each Congress before it.

(Photo by Jason Pepesku / CC)